Christmas and the unparalleled joys of motherhood

Earlier this year, my wife attended a baby shower for a woman having her first child. My wife, a mother of five children, was a bit of an outlier in a crowd of female professionals, the majority of whom had no children, and who had no intention of having any children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the comments during that baby shower kept returning to the theme of impending lost autonomy. Motherhood, according to many people, is more loss than gain.

At Christmastime, that presents a curious tension with the original impetus for the holiday. Though of course it is not any child whose birth we celebrate, that we do so implicitly suggests that all births are to be honored and welcomed. Christmas is not only a festival commemorating the union of God to humanity, but also the unparalleled joys of expectant and fulfilled motherhood, with all of its wondrous anticipation of a new life that will irrevocably change us.

“Before I had a child, I had no idea how I’d feel once she was there, though I had a dim sense that pregnancy and birth usually does something far-reaching to the emotional landscapes of women who experience it,” writes Mary Harrington in her recently published book Feminism Against Progress. “Even so, the starkness of the contrast between how I experienced the world previously, and how I experienced it once my daughter was in my life, still took me by surprise.”

Though Harrington had once believed that individual freedom was the supreme good, the disorienting experience of motherhood changed that, as she realized her very self was “partly merged with a dependent infant.” It was not only that as her baby’s parent and guardian, the child belonged to her, but that she as mother belonged to her baby. And none of the obligations to her child—feeding, clothing, and protecting her—were optional. “Her interests mattered more to me than anything else in the world, including my once-treasured autonomy.”

Harrington’s abandonment of a feminism suspicious of motherhood in favor of a feminism suspicious of abortion and contraception is arresting, though the women’s rights and anti-abortion movements were not always understood as polar opposites. In the nineteenth century, for example, popular discourse “understood abortion, infanticide, and abandonment as fundamentally similar acts—they were all attempts to rid oneself of an unwanted child,” according to Monica Klem and Madeline McDowell in their book Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion & Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America. For an abbreviated period of American history, the two movements “worked in tandem to improve the conditions of society for women and to save the lives of unborn children by decreasing the prevalence of abortion.” These activists believed in the dignity of all women as moral beings who are deserving of respect and sympathy, and the life in their wombs as worthy of protection.

Indeed, when a Boston-based pastor suggested that women’s suffrage was in lockstep with the promotion of abortion, Sudan B. Anthony firmly denied the connection. Rather, suffragists argued that the woman’s vote would serve as a bulwark against abortion, because women believed it was an act taken only by desperate women in a society that did not afford them sufficient economic and legal rights, and thus persuaded them (wrongly) that abortion was the best option. The decoupling of these two groups only occurred with the influence of a eugenics movement that viewed abortion as a means of curbing impoverished, inferior children, as well as a shift away from the moral responsibility of the individual towards a broader, depersonalized focus on the betterment of society writ large.

Ever since, the most influential manifestations of feminism have subordinated the individual life in the womb—whatever dignity or rights it possessed—to more impersonal forces central to modernity: personal autonomy, social and economic improvement, self-realization. Fertility became perceived no longer as an intrinsic component of authentic womanhood, but an antagonist and obstacle to it, one to be combated with chemicals, plastics, and medical procedures. Fertility is something to be managed and controlled, as is the child, who, ideally, is carefully conceived (and perhaps even scientifically chosen), and who enters a world where his or her parents can quickly delegate parental responsibility to other caregivers and professionals.

In his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, St. John Paul II presented a very different understanding of the mother and her relationship with her child:

Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman’s womb. The mother is filled with wonder at this mystery of life, and “understands” with unique intuition what is happening inside her. In the light of the “beginning”, the mother accepts and loves as a person the child she is carrying in her womb.

Rather than being an inconvenience that is technocratically and therapeutically managed to avoid obstructing personal autonomy, motherhood is a life-changing reality, an opportunity to widen our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual horizons. The child is not a choice carefully selected so as to limit his or her interference in our lives, nor something we select, like so many other commodities, but a surprising and exciting gift.

And through rejoicing in that gift, loving that gift, devoting ourselves to that gift, we, far from losing our sense of self, discover it. The twentieth-century British Catholic writer Caryll Houselander explains this irony:

In the service of the infant we are made whole. Every detail of our life is set by it into a single pattern and ordered by a single purpose. We are integrated by the singleness of one compelling love…. It demands of us voluntary poverty. The giving up of self…. As long as we have something else to give, we always cling to self; but the infant lays his minute hand on that and rejects everything else. This love, austere, childlike, and poor, is life-giving love.

As Mary Harrington found, the child is not a plaything or even relationship that we can pick up and drop as our whims dictate. It is rather a constant demand upon us that vitiates freedom for the sake of freedom, teaching us that it is actually in sacrifice and self-gift we become ourselves.

Christmas quite compellingly instructs us in this beautiful paradox. This was certainly how the early Church understood the connection between the Incarnation and motherhood. Mary’s Magnificat as described in Luke 1:46-55 “marks an unprecedented moment in salvation history. Israel’s expectation has become an expectant mother’s longing,” writes John Saward in Redeemer in the Womb: Jesus Living in Mary. Man’s salvation is indelibly intertwined with the joy and expectation of pregnancy. Thus believed St. Ephrem the Syrian, a Doctor of the Church known as the “Harp of the Spirit,” who hints that the Incarnation represents a divine blessing of the human womb. Saward quotes St. Ephrem:

It is a source of great amazement, my beloved
that someone should enquire into the wonder
of how God came down
and made his dwelling a womb,
and how that Being
put on the body of a man,
spending nine months in a womb,
not shrinking from such a home;
and how a womb of flesh was able
to carry flaming fire…

Citing a number of other patristic texts, Saward concludes: “The reverence shown in these texts for the unborn child, for the human body, and for womanhood is without pagan parallel.”

In the womb of the expectant mother, the woman feels the presence of another. And as we reflect on the Incarnation, we can appreciate, as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council explain in Gaudium et Spes, “For by his Incarnation, the Son of God has in some fashion united himself with every human being.” Because the womb has been found worthy of hosting the presence of God, all wombs are, by extension, blessed. Because God was an infant, an unexpected gift in need of protection and sacrifice, all children are deserving of the same.

We associate Christmas with many things: music, food, decorations, gifts, a renewed attention to things religious. Often overlooked is that it is also the honoring of an expectant mother and the child she will soon nurse, hold, and love, changing her, and the world, forever. Perhaps this Christmas we should consider another message: that pregnancy and the birth of a new child, even in the most harrowing of circumstances, is always more gain than loss.